“It’s like seeing a baby’s penis,” he reasons. Crazy Frog’s penis was clearly visible in the video, which attracted mass complaints. He also found himself facing the wrath of the Advertising Standards Authority. “The minute that was released, boom – it was No 1 in 23 countries in the world,” says Söderberg, who found himself travelling the world to collect gold and platinum records. When the song came out in May 2005, it changed the lives of everyone involved. In the video, a bounty is placed on the frog’s head and a sinister character chases him around the city, eventually firing a rocket at him – which the frog ends up riding to safety. Kaktus agreed to make the animation on condition that they had carte blanche to do what they wanted.
Wolfgang Boss, executive president of A&R at Sony Music, wanted to pair the frog with a sped-up version of the theme tune to Beverly Hills Cop, a song called Axel F. “I myself got annoyed with it,” admits Söderberg.
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Jamba! then spent an unprecedented amount of money promoting the infectious ringtone on TV – in May 2005, it was shown 2,378 times a day – incurring the wrath of the British public. Kaktus agreed an advance and a royalties arrangement (“obviously way too low”, says Söderberg) and the deal was done. In 2004, ringtones were a billion-dollar industry with their own charts – even printed in the pages of NME, to the horror of some loyal readers.
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The first came when the mobile phone content provider Jamba! called Wernquist, who had landed a job at Kaktus thanks to his frog design, to ask if they could license the character’s noise for a ringtone. There were two important steps in Crazy Frog’s original ascent to cultural infamy.
Kaktus decided that the world was telling it one thing: bring back the frog. Earlier this year, Rita Ora sampled the Axel F track in her song Bang Bang (though this is news to Söderberg). Interest seemed to surge a few years ago, says Söderberg, who claims that it was at one point getting 4m new views per day. The original hit has more than 3bn views on YouTube, making it the 26th most-watched video on the site, and the Crazy Frog YouTube channel has 11.5m subscribers. You might well question who wants this dated irritation back, but the frog fandom endures. The frog’s future is in Söderberg’s hands. Although the character’s gibbered cry was invented by a teenager called Daniel Malmedahl in 1997 and his body created by animator Erik Wernquist in 2003, Crazy Frog Entertainment owns the intellectual property, and Söderberg and his business partner Andreas Wicklund produce the character’s videos. “He looks the same, he acts the same, but he’s a fresher frog,” says Sigfrid Söderberg, CEO of Kaktus Film and Crazy Frog Entertainment. Next month, the once-ubiquitous amphibian will release a new single – a mash-up of a classic and a more recent song, the details of which the frog’s guardians are keeping under wraps, other than to say that both are popular on TikTok. The character was so hated that hackers found success with a virus offering to show users an image of him being killed off. The craze lasted for five Top 20 hits and then mercifully dwindled. “And yet at the same, it’s strangely compelling.” “The frog is irritating to the point of distraction and back again,” wrote BBC News. Then it became the most popular – and divisive – single of 2005, coupled with a CGI video of an explicitly naked frog on the lam in a futuristic cityscape. First sold as a ringtone, his nonsensical catchphrase, “Rring ding ding ding baa baa”, entered the national vocabulary. F or a few months in 2005, you couldn’t move without encountering Crazy Frog.
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